Kenyon left his house at seventeen minutes past eight. The time was recorded by the observing camera on the gate to the boatyard opposite their house, the fat black wires running up to its single eye like black veins. It registered Kenyon, in—if it could see in colour—a blue suit, with a surprisingly yellowish raincoat in the crook of his elbow, leaving the house and shutting the door behind him. It saw him look about him, up into the sky, hesitate for a moment and then raise his umbrella, an old-fashioned non-folding object with a knotty wooden handle. From that, any future watcher of its record could deduce that the forecast for the west of England that morning, of light passing showers, was as accurate as the meteorological record, published the day after the meteorological events had taken place, would subsequently prove to be.
The boatyard camera was not the first mechanical record Kenyon had left that morning. While his bath had been running, he had checked his emails, gaining access at seven fourteen and logging off at seven twenty-two; he read six emails, three of which were from Australia and sent overnight, concerning a conference in Canberra Kenyon was to attend in January. These emails, and the replies Kenyon sent, were recorded remotely, in several buildings devoted to the communications industry, available should any government officer wish to read Kenyon’s communications. Also registered remotely were the names of three websites Kenyon logged on to and read distractedly while his bath was running, one concerning the film appearances of Rita Hayworth, whom Kenyon had dreamt making a singular appearance in the film The Sound of Music: Kenyon established to his satisfaction that Rita Hayworth, contrary to his vivid dream, had not played a nun in the film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. After his bath, quickly observing that his wife was still asleep, he made a short call on his mobile telephone. He did so standing at the breakfast counter with a purple towel about his waist, and another, a blue one, draped over his shoulders. The telephone call began at seven fifty-three and ended ninety seconds later, at seven fifty-four. At seven fifty-six he phoned the same number and spoke more briefly, for only nine or ten seconds. The number, the times and the lengths of the calls were relayed to the computerized records of another communications company, to remain there until summoned by an official agency, deleted, or most plausibly Doomsday. Thereafter, no one registered the movements or actions of Kenyon until he left his house and was filmed by the boatyard camera. He had a cup of coffee.
The boatyard camera, installed in spring 2004 against the worry of vandalism, and still working without any problem, filmed Kenyon walking from left to right across its field of interest. Then he disappeared from public observation until he reached, five hundred yards towards the centre of town, the quay. In turn, he was recorded by the camera attached to the pub, which looked down on its own patrons; the camera on the bus-stop, panning across the car park; the camera fixed to the entrance of the antiques centre. He passed between their fields, a small figure in a blue suit with a yellowish raincoat in the crook of his arm. Some of the cameras only observed a black shining mushroom with ribs, the dome of the umbrella. Cross-referencing between cameras would have been necessary to establish the identity of the single figure, moving between cameras like an object passed from stranger to stranger. Other cameras, pointing outwards from jewellers’ shops, filmed him passing, recorded and deposited in unknown vaults, to be watched by who knew who. Other cameras merely looked plausible, but had never filmed anyone or anything, were only empty boxes, deterrents, placebos.
Kenyon stopped at the cashpoint machine belonging to the HSBC bank at the end of the Fore street, a square metal box let into the wall of a white eighteenth-century customs house, the windows discreetly strengthened against robbery or filled in with brick and plaster. The bank’s records would have shown that at eight twenty-eight a.m., Kenyon took out a hundred pounds in cash, leaving him with a debit balance of £4,524.20 A curious investigator, from the bank, from a central public authority, from the sort of agencies that investigated and propagated the creditworthy qualities of individuals to anyone who subscribed to their database, or simply some hacker who for curiosity’s sake or in hope of robbery and fraud had investigated Kenyon’s finances—any of these people would have discovered that his agreed overdraft facility was £5,000, that in three days his salary would be paid into his account, reducing the overdraft but not quite erasing it, and that he also owed £7,477.98 on his one credit card. They would not have discovered, either the investigators or the cameras under whose gaze Kenyon fell that morning, the fit of panic and worry that came over him when he fed his card into the machine, knowing that his bank balance was around the £5,000 limit, not knowing exactly whether it had breached the line.
It would, however, record for the benefit of anyone who was able to breach the bank’s security protocols that the next person to take any money out was the sixteen-year-old Anna McLeod, staying with her grandparents, who took out twenty pounds at nine nineteen, an unusually long gap between users at this hour in the morning. It would be only the fourth time Anna McLeod had used a cashpoint machine on her own behalf—her mother had trusted her with her own card once or twice, but not a third time. Anna McLeod would use it with a sense of excitement and exuberance, and not at all with the sense that it was her own money that she was removing from its resting place with no particular objective or need. The machines and lenses of record registered all of this, and would come to register more about Anna McLeod. Before the year was out—on the last day of the year, in fact, heading away from a party in Exmouth in the passenger seat of an erratically driven old Fiat—the then seventeen-year-old Anna McLeod would be discovered by police to be in possession of two illegal pills, and the building blocks of her body and mind, her blood and skin and hair, the particular configuration of deoxyribonucleic acid, which resulted from the confluence of Marianne McLeod and (unknown to anyone at all, buried in that configuration of deoxyribonucleic acid) Marianne McLeod’s boss Stewart at the Vehicle Licensing Centre where she had worked for six months in 1993 and not Marianne’s Scotch-accountant husband Mungo at all, that DNA which had made an Anna McLeod out of the conjunction of an egg and a stranger’s sperm in 1993 would be stored for ever more in a file, on a computer, in a database, to be drawn up and rifled through in future by bored forensic policemen whenever any kind of crime had been committed, anywhere in the country.
Kenyon took the money, which he now considered his, and walked down the Fore street. He had never come into contact with the police; had never been suspected of any crime, whether justly or unjustly. So no one had his DNA, apart from Kenyon himself, and Hettie, of course. His appearance, on the other hand, was registered on the police cameras outside the post office, the ones outside the community centre, which were trained on the statue of the Crapping Juvenile and only caught his legs from the knee down. Private security cameras outside three pubs, in the windows of the hedge-fund trader’s one-man abstract art emporium, in another jeweller’s shop and a souvenir shop captured Kenyon, his tense face and drawn-in, rapid walk. Perhaps the observers who followed his stride from the record on this succession of cameras might have observed the figures counting the time at the bottom of the film, might have wondered about the irregular service of the train from Hanmouth. Such an observer would have realized that at the last of the cameras, outside the Three Ferrets, Kenyon had been caught three minutes before the Bide-ford train left the station, with two hundred yards to run.
As the ticket machine at the station was refusing to accept bank notes or coins, it recorded Kenyon putting his bank card into the slot and pressing his four-digit code. The camera above the machine and, more remotely, the cameras positioned at either end of both platforms would have recorded the same events, though with less detail. The machine, and the database behind it, would have recorded the same user, the same bank card, the same numbers being used to acquire a train ticket every Monday morning for several years. It was unusual, however, for the ticket to be bought on a Monday morning, and the machines would have known that Kenyon was not buying a ticket this morning for his usual destination, London. His bank account, in addition to the one hundred pounds already debited this morning, was now debited a further £2.30 only. This information was stored, too, against an eventual retrieval by the authorities or those who concerned themselves with such matters.
The train that now arrived was observed by a series of cameras, but they did not observe what Kenyon saw: the bluish morning light, the veiled quality of the hills across the estuary; the sight of a large gull lodged diagonally on the wind like a back-slash, veering into the train’s direction, veering off again with a call like a harsh but happy yell; a sudden and brief shadowing of the light as a single cloud fell over the early sun; the silent moon like a fingernail in the sky; a dog racing against the train in its back garden, and barking in joy as it ran. At most, shadows on the film and the digital flow, not seen at all by the mechanical recording angels along our paths, seen only by Kenyon. The cameras watched him as he got out at the central station, not mounting the London train now waiting at platform five but leaving the station instead; watched him climb the hill to the bus station; watched him wait and mount the Harvesthaye bus, paying, however, by cash (a little detective work would be needed here to go on following Kenyon’s tracks); watched the bus heave itself up the hill by the hospital and, a dozen times, past some building in need of protection or observation, and then another dozen times.
By chance, the stop that he got off at was opposite a bank, and the house that he walked to, three minutes away, just past a school with two great lenses at its gates. So his progress was remarked. He had been filmed or his actions recorded fifty times between getting up and nine thirty, when he got to the place he was getting to. The remote and patiently employed angels could have discovered that he had told his employers over the phone that he was ill, that he had phoned a man who lived seven miles away, once, and that that man owned the house he now found himself at the door of, that he had got out money and would not for another couple of days: money, it could be deduced, to keep him and the man in takeaway pizza for a day or two. But they could not have told, because the door was out of sight, with what delight and happiness the man, whose name was Ahmed Khalil, as the authorities could have discovered, opened the door to Kenyon, the way in which, the door closed behind them, they fell on each other, feeding on each other with a fury concentrated in the mouth and lips, their hands on each other, roaming and gripping as Kenyon’s clothes were pulled off and fell to the floor, his lover’s bathrobe falling open as Kenyon went to his knees. Could not know, either, how both of them, in middle age, felt once again, for the ninth time, a rejuvenation in their lust, the sense of the teenage. The cameras in the street could not have told the secrets of the human heart; they could not and did not see Kenyon and Ahmed, meeting for the ninth time in this way. But you did, and I did.